Gno Schitt

The least common denominator

Journalist H.L. Mencken was a fierce critic of democrazy, arguing that it prevented the better sort of man from reshaping society. In 1920, he wrote:

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men.

As democrazy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

This guy has probably been shot by the time you see this video, so enjoy it for posterity.

TVTrigger is the program that all us TV downloaders have been waiting for. Essentially, the program is a Bittorrent client that specializes in TV shows. The slick interface makes it easy for you to track down your favourite shows from over 3000 options. It provides detailed info on the show, trailers, soundtracks, cast, episode guide and more. Even better, when you choose your favourite shows you can quickly and easily have the program automatically download new episodes for you when they air, so that the show is ready to watch when you are.

I'm still in the process of testing the software out, but first impressions are quite good. I had it downloaded and set-up with 5 different shows within 10 minutes, and it was downloading the episode of Survivor about 30 seconds after I put Survivor into my list of favourites.

Easy-to-use and so-far effective, TVTrigger gets your shows to you when you want them!

This is bloody amazing. Some resourceful dude mashed up a bunch of YouTube videos to create this catchy, jazzy tune. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

I found this conversation between authors Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath to be extremely interesting about the state of the publishing industry. Some highlights include:

• One of them turning down a half million dollar contract from a publisher to instead self publish


• Monkey/frog rape


• 27 of the top 100 books on Amazon are self published


• New York Times list ignores self published books despite some of them being the highest sellers


• Inability for publishers to release digital copies of older books

Note: this is a long long conversation but well worth the read

There's the age old argument about whether what kids see on TV (or play in video games, yada, yada) will have an adverse effect on them - or not. Well I've long been a proponent of the YES vote. This makes my point nicely, I think.

A worthy song for a worthy actor

Some demented genius took the original Super Mario Brothers and reimagined it as a shooter.



The guy gets bonus points for giving my wife motion sickness.

As i go through my days, Itry to find stuff to bring a smile to my face and others. This one was shared by a friend of mine, and then I saw it on G4.

Work-life balance, says Nigel Marsh, is too important to be left in the hands of your employer. At TEDxSydney, Marsh lays out an ideal day balanced between family time, personal time and productivity -- and offers some stirring encouragement to make it happen.



(Nigel Marsh is the author of "Fat, Forty and Fired" and "Overworked and Underlaid.")

I just wanted to make sure Pseudorequiem knew this ;)

Catchy song. Fun video. Quotable lines: "Lord Voldemort greeted Vader with a fist pound."



Now dance bitches!!

I've just started to get into QR codes a bit.  In case you don't know what they are, they are a visual hyperlink emblem that can be scanned by any modern smart phone/device equipped with a camera and a program for scanning.

I use ScanLife, but I hear that QuickMark is also a good one, as is the one made by Kaywa (they have a service that let's you create your own QR codes, should you need them for marketing material).  All of these apps are readily available from the application store of choice for your device.

I think this is the way of the future.  Soon, URLs won't be used on marketing publication materials, instead the ubiquitous QR code will begin to appear on all media be it print, TV or billboard style.  I even heard that they've been used successfully on the sides of buildings to advertise the commercial space as available with all of the terms/costs.

Grab an app for BlackBerry, any android device, iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad and give it a try:



How fucking sweet was that?

What indeed? Enjoy this odd, well-edited little video...

Last night I had a great experience. I was working on campus and was to set up one of the lecture halls for a guest speaker. I work on campus in the Media Access department (yes, I am the A/V guy). I went to the lecture hall to meet the speaker and set it up to how they wanted it. To my surprise the guest speaker was Bob McDonald from Quirks and Quarks. After setting it up we ended up sitting for about 10 minutes just chatting. It was a slow night and I stayed to watch his presentation which was highly entertaining. After the presentation I felt a bit star struck and got my picture taken with him (notice the shit eating grin I have).



I know that many of you are going to either comment on the fact that he isn't a celebrity (or a large one at that) so why were you star struck, but he had a huge impact on my decision to want to be a highschool biology teacher. It is because of him and one other TV personality, John Acorn, that my passion for science and nature grew when I was a kid. Meeting him made me feel like a kid again, and listening to his lecture really affirmed my decision on education. The short take home from his lecture I would like to share with you, and you can really apply it to all facets. No matter how much we know, or think we know, there is always more to learn. Don't stop questioning or learning.

Thanks for reading, just felt like sharing that with you all.

I've recently been forced to face the truth that it's not the starting of something that is so hard.  Nor is the process of brainstorming good ideas significantly difficult.

The challenge is in the finishing of things.

One of the by products of our fast-food, disposable culture is the unrelenting flood of human waste caused by the unceasingly incomplete.  Time and time again, a great idea or kernel of a fantastic project, is set aside because the creator does not have the discipline (or enough disciples natch) to see it across the finish line.  Some projects suffer death by committee where the creator cannot overcome the resistance thrown up by others.

I'm not pointing any fingers here, I'm probably one of the worst offenders.

After receiving a low disk space warning on my high performance audio project drive, I was forced to take a look at what the fuck was on there.  What I uncovered was pretty fucking terrifying.  Aside from almost 4GB I recovered by removing all of Ruxpin's* older stuff, I was able to dump almost 18GB of project data that I could see now was NEVER going to be completed.

What was all that shit?  Well, a number of the projects were ideas that I had in a flash and thought I better record it, jot it down, or make an audible note so that I could return to it and finish it up later.  Some of them were bare bones re-mix attempts that I lost interest in and decided to abandon, but a very scary number of them (about 30) were songs that were 80% done, or worse, were 98% done (i.e. complete, but with some obvious lazy mistakes in it I had not bothered to fix) and then  poorly mixed down to a master that I then used once or twice in a rush either DJ'ing or burning to CD to give away.  In retrospect, embarrassing.

The decade of 2000 - 2010 is littered with the remnants of my incomplete projects (audio, and otherwise).

Now, many an artist will tell you that no work is truly finished, only abandoned.  I'm starting to think that's a pile of whining narcissistic self-indulgent horse shit.  It's the kind of marshmallow garbage you would expect from people who complain about deadlines, lament the fact that their work doesn't sell**, and flit from obligation to obligation looking for the 'right fit' for their creative talents.  I think it's fair to say that I'm guilty of subscribing to this view when it was convenient (recheck that second asterisk point below to verify this admission).

What I submit to you is this: a public declaration of commitment to complete forces a person to change their view of their work.  I'm back in my studio again, quite a lot actually, because of changes that started before Christmas.  Two things conspired to get me back in here: a deterioration of my general baseline health status (I believe the laypeople call it 'mortality', I was as shocked as you are that I'm so afflicted), and an opportunity to work with a junior film creator in Prague.

I told that person that I would have a couple of pieces of sound work completed for his short film by a certain date, and by god I had to make good on the commitment because HE in turn had a deadline.  I had to wrap my head around the fact that one way or another, this 'product' had to 'ship' (at this point I'll refer you to Seth Godin).  It was energizing.  It was strangely, counter intuitively, liberating.  I didn't obsess about reaching "when it's perfect", nothing ever is, and this is probably where that artist mantra above comes from.  Instead, I concentrated on "when it's done".

So, for the rest of this year, I'm going to try to think about new projects differently.   Instead of enumerating all of the possibilities each project can entail, I'll frame it in terms of the deliverables I can complete in order to call the project done.

On that note, I would like to re-start the conversation regarding Project Unknown, as proposed by LordJim earlier this year.  I believe the best place to start is to get the interested parties together in a room early on a weekday evening, add a few pints and some munchies, and talk about ideas (we will still need one after all).  Very soon after we have put ideas on the table, I think we will need to make a commitment to some kind of deliverable - a point when we can call the project done.  I am uncertain what the shape of the commitment will be, just as I have no clarity yet about the project we will pursue.  Commitment is scary, I'm scared just thinking about being committed to the completion of this because it means work, but I think it's okay to be scared and I want to participate anyway.

I know we have a bunch of creative, hard working, loving, dedicated people around us.  I know we can get something going, and if we get started I'm going to stay committed to figuring out how we can get that something finished.

Of course, I'm also a sometimes douche-nozzle.

* we had just been lazy about moving his old projects off of my machine, he has been working in Logic on his laptop for almost 2 years now, this transition from one place to another is yet another incomplete project in itself, we wrapped this one up now though
** my work isn't selling right now either, and I do complain about it, so I can fairly be called a hypocrite

It all makes sense now.

Be afraid my friends, be afraid...

Came across this and it was an interesting read. It talk's about the trend in Hollywood and gives a nice visual reference that movies are getting worse. There is a neat little interactive graph showing the ratings of movies. I like how they categorize the movies and find that in my opinion that the graph is very accurate.